Paul Muller at Heretical Ideas asks for feedback from Democrats on the reactions of Democratic presidential candiates to the President’s dropping the steel tariffs. Here are some quotes from the AP article:

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news – web sites) said that despite Bush’s claims “the steel industry needs additional breathing room to get back on its feet.” Rep. Dick Gephardt (news – web sites), D-Mo., said Bush’s action demonstrated a “callous disregard for the workers and the communities whose jobs and livelihoods have been decimated by unfair competition.” Former Gen. Wesley Clark (news – web sites) said Bush needed to “listen to the 2.6 million manufacturing workers who’ve lost their jobs” while he has been in office.

I for one am extremely dissappointed in these three candidates. Well, Gephardt I expected it from, he’s Mr. Protectionist. But Dean and Clark are both smart enough to know that tariffs are not good for the American economy, and their pandering to the steel industry is just as pathetic as the President’s pandering was. (Although fortunately they can’t back up their pandering with real tariffs. Not yet anyway.)

It’s looking more and more like I’ll be sitting out the Democratic primary, assuming Lieberman drops out before the Tennessee primaries, and then voting Libertarian in the general election.

Here’s a question for the Constitutional Law experts out there. Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution grants to Congress the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises". Article II does not grant the President any such power. How is it that the President has the power to impose tariffs on steel?

I’m guessing that some law passed by Congress granted this power to the President. But why wouldn’t that be an unconstitutional delegation of power? Have the federal courts ruled on this specific issue?

Fellow Ph.D. (gosh, it feels good to write that) Steven Taylor has the weekly update on the Toast-O-Meter, which now has a new feature—looking at the fortunes of the Nine versus Bush as well. After all, there’s now less than 11 months until Election Day! (Sick of the campaign yet?)

Meanwhile, Martin Devon joins the emerging consensus that Dean is virtually unstoppable at this point. Quoth Martin:

Even if Kerry and Gephardt lose early and withdraw from the race that still leaves four credible Dems spliting the anti-Dean vote. By the time two of the remaining four face reality it may already be too late for the survivors to win.

Sound familiar? I said the same thing three weeks ago.

Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered has some predictions as well; I think he’s lowballing the Democrats and giving too much credit to the Greens (I can’t see the Greens getting 7% of the vote, especially if Howard Dean is the nominee).

Yes, there’s more pre-defense jitters here in OxVegas. A brainteaser:

Q: How do you make your dissertation ten pages longer without writing a single word?
A: Realize that your page numbers are supposed to be 1″ from the bottom of the page, instead of the body text being 1″ from the bottom of the page. Grrr. (The scary thing: solving that problem in LaTeX took less time than figuring out how to get the right page number to show up on the copyright page in OpenOffice when I put together the signature page, title page, and copyright page. So much for WYSIWYG…)

Anyway, enough about me (12:45 and counting). Matt Stinson is getting medieval on Howard Dean’s latest foreign policy pronouncements. Rather than campaign contributions, I think Democrats should all chip in to make Dr. Dean sit through a few IR seminars, rather than getting his foreign policy advice from Jimmy Carter (whose latest accomplishment seems to have been to lend a hand to efforts to dismantle the state of Israel).

Steven Taylor has the latest update on the Toast-O-Meter, with Howard Dean firmly in the lead. Says Steven:

Dean continues to race ahead, with none of the Other Eight seemingly able to catch up. As pollster Frank Luntz noted on Hardball this week, his status is so well established that when the Other Eight attack him, they are seen in a negative light, rather than the attacks bringing Dean back to earth.

I might also add a separate classification to the Toast-O-Meter: whether the candidate is achieving his or her goals—perhaps how “buttery” the toast is. For example, we all know that Al Sharpton doesn’t really want the nomination: he just wants to hog the spotlight at the convention. So being 2nd in South Carolina actually serves his interests, because he’ll rack up delegates. This, however, may only apply to the novelty candidates.

Mark of Southern Appeal links to the latest predictions by CQ analyst Craig Crawford, which correlate highly with those of the Toast-O-Meter.

Eugene Volokh notes that Howard Dean’s campaign blog is trumpeting an endorsement from Ted Rall from Rall’s latest Universal Press Syndicate column. For those unfamiliar with Rall, he’s the unthinking man’s Tom Tomorrow. I guess Howard’s still not done tacking left…

Having said that, I agree with Rall* that Dean is the Democrats’ best chance for beating Bush, because (a) he has the plurality support of the party’s base and (b) those plurality supporters won’t stand for anyone else in the field, no matter how much they try to tack to the left. The way I see it, the Dems can get 45% of the national popular vote with Dean, or 35–40% with anyone else, with the remainder either defecting to the Greens or just staying home.

Glenn Reynolds has the reaction from the right, including posts from Eye on the Left, Tim Blair, and Blogs for Bush.

James Joyner of OTB notes that Matt Drudge is reporting that Howard Dean may have exaggerated a medical condition to avoid serving in Vietnam. Like James, I don’t expect it to have much impact on the election; however, if Dean wins the nomination, it will make it more difficult for relatively scrupulous Democrats to trot out the “Bush went AWOL” rumors.

In general, though, I don’t think people care all that much any more; witness the failure of both John F. “I Served in Vietnam” Kerry and Wes Clark to gain much traction with their military histories. Past military service (or the lack thereof) hasn’t really been a meaningful issue in a presidential contest since 1960.*

John Cole thinks the news is a hit piece orchestrated by Kerry and/or Clark; apparently, Drudge’s scoop is based on this New York Times piece by Rick Lyman and Christopher Drew.

Other reactions: Kevin at Wizbang! thinks it was planted by Kerry, while Steve at Tiny Little Lies thinks Dean is screwed regardless of who planted it (or if, in the immortal words of Andy Sipowicz, Dean’s camp launched “preemptive stink”). And Matt Stinson agrees with James and I that the attack probably won't work, while Poliblogger Steven Taylor makes the point that Dean is well-positioned even if the charge does stick with some voters:

[S]ince he is running as essentially the anti-war candidate, in some ways this simply adds to that position in its own kind of way. In other words, the hard-core Democrats who are currently gung-ho for Dean are hardly going to fault him for not wanting to go to Viet Nam, now are they?

Steven Taylor notes the latest setbacks for Bilbo wannabe Roy Moore, late of the Alabama Supreme Court. First the Alabama convention of the Southern Baptist Church distanced itself from Moore, then the perennially irrelevant Constitution Party invited Moore to be its 2004 presidential nominee. Now all that’s left is for Moore to get an MSNBC talk show with Phil Donahue to complete his deserved slide into pathetic obscurity.

Virginia Postrel comments on a WaPo interview with Howard Dean that gives her the impression that Dean is “the thinking man’s Cruz Bustamante” (which may actually be an oxymoron). It’s fairly clear that Dean’s still tacking left; quoth Virginia:

Dean is running as a guy who wants to control the economy from Washington and who sees business as fundamentally bad. “Any business that offers stock options” covers a lot of companies, including some of the economy’s most promising and dynamic.

Regulation tends to be relatively invisible to the general public, in part because it’s mind-numbingly technical. That makes it much more difficult to reverse, much easier for interest groups to manipulate, and much more dangerous to the general health of the economy than the taxing and spending that attract attention from pundits.

She also has a challenge for the so-called “libertarians for Dean.” Ultimately (assuming Dean gets the nod) they’re going to have to decide whether being pissed off because Bush knocked off Saddam Hussein is sufficient reason to hand the keys of the economy—namely the federal regulatory apparatus—over to a man who barely pays lip service to capitalism.

One of the classic quotes of politics comes from French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Asked, after losing in the first round of a French presidential contest (in 1988, I believe) to Jacques Chirac and François Mitterand, who he would back in the second round, he described the choice as one between “bad or worse”*; in 2004, hardcore libertarians are going to have to decide which is worse, but for now that honor seems squarely to belong to Dean.

Jacob Levy approvingly notes Joe Lieberman’s response to this nonsense. Like Jacob, I’d hate to see the Democrats return to their bad old protectionist ways, but outside a few DLCers like Clinton, Lieberman, and 1990s-Gore I don’t think the party ever really shed its protectionist bent; when Clinton spearheaded expansion of NAFTA to include Mexico in 1994, he did it with mostly Republican backing on the Hill.

Daniel Drezner comments as well, as does Andrew Sullivan; this is my entry in James’ inaugural Beltway Traffic Jam.

Steven Taylor throws cold water on the idea that the Democrats will have a so-called “brokered convention”—i.e. that the plurality winner of the primary process won’t be the ultimate nominee. This isn’t the 1960s, and the Democratic base—particularly the Deanites—isn’t going to accept such meddling from party elites, and no amount of wishful thinking from either the media or anti-Dean forces in the party is going to affect that.

To get someone—anyone—other than Howard Dean as the nominee is going to require a lot of anti-Dean Democrats to swallow their pride and put the party ahead of their own interests before the end of the year (maybe even the end of November), so the designated “anti-Dean” candidate—Dick Gephardt seems like the only alternative with enough Old Left street cred, regional ties in the midwest swing states, and establishment support—can gain sufficient traction against both Dean and the novelty candidates. And if you see John Kerry, John Edwards, or Wes Clark stepping aside to back Gephardt, you’re truly kidding yourself.

My current theory on how the nomination battle will play out is explicated here.

James Joyner essentially agrees.

The local Deanies are congregating tonight in Oxford, according to today’s Daily Mississippian. I pass this along in case you want a warning notice to flee across state lines lest you come into contact with any of these individuals.

Incidentally, the fact that one of Dean’s aides is named—and I truly wish I was kidding—“Zephyr Teachout” will explain everything you need to know about this presidential campaign.

I don’t have a hokey website like perennial SN foil Larry Sabato, but I do make slightly better predictions than James Joyner and Stephen Green. Quoth James:

I always thought that the race was going to come down to electable candidates because of the dampening effects of the early Southern primaries. I figured Dean could do well in the “retail” contests in Iowa and New Hampshire—although perhaps losing both of them to favorite sons Gephardt and Kerry—by energizing the base. But I thought, and indeed continue to think, that he’s not going to be very appealing in South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states.

... With so many of the primaries stacked at the beginning of the year, fundraising is even more crucial than ever. Right now, the only candidates I can see able to sustain a serious race against Dean are Gephardt—who pretty much HAS to win Iowa or he moves up three shades on the Toast-O-Meter—and Wes Clark, who has a pretty good team thanks to the Clinton Machine. But I don’t know who Clark’s base is at this point and Lieberman’s presumed base, organized labor, seems to be split between him and Dean. So the key is to survive the early primaries and hope there’s an “anybody but Howard Dean” movement. [emphasis mine]

Fundraising, organization, and exciting the base are going to hand this nomination to Howard Dean, and I’ve been saying that to anyone who’d listen to my drunken political ramblings in bars and on rooftops since mid-July. The key to both Iowa and New Hampshire is getting the base on board the campaign, and that’s something that Dean has mastered.

The problem for the anti-Dean forces isn’t that Iowa and New Hampshire will lock the nomination up; instead, the problem is that the post-New Hampshire winnowing process doesn’t effectively winnow candidates—it’s far too time-compressed. Anyone who has enough money in the bank now to last until Iowa can survive until mid-March, on the basis of the money they’re going to get from today until Iowa alone. Fundraising simply won’t dry up fast enough to stop candidates who lose in South Carolina from persisting through Super Tuesday and beyond.

The other problem for the serious anti-Dean candidates is that the weighted PR system adopted by the party for this round—you qualify for delegates if you get 15% of the vote in any congressional district—benefits candidates who can draw clear distinctions between themselves and the other candidates. There’s no clear substitute for Dean in the field. On the other hand, Kerry is essentially interchangeable with half-a-dozen other white guys in suits in the field; the “I like an establishment Democrat” voter has no clear favorite, so they’ll just spread their votes around four or five different ways. The other likely beneficiary from the allocation rules is Al Sharpton, who will get a lot of his delegates from states that are unwinnable by the Democrats in the general election—particularly since the delegates aren’t allocated equally by congressional district, instead extra delegates are allocated to congressional districts that vote for Democratic presidential candidates.

Unless most of the “establishment Democrats” like Clark, Kerry, Gephardt, and Edwards can come to an agreement—and soon—that essentially has everyone except one of them drop out to maximize the “anybody but Howard Dean” vote, I don’t see any way for anyone but Dean to capture an overwhelming majority of the elected delegates. And even if Dean fails to capture an outright majority (including the superdelegates), I find it exceptionally unlikely that the Democrats would be able to get away with brokering the convention to nominate either a “white knight” candidate or a candidate who lost head-to-head with Dean in the primary process—frankly, I think the Dean base would abandon the party if it came to that. So, for now, it’s essentially Dean’s nomination to lose.

And Matthew Stinson points out the second half of the Dean Catch-22: his complete and utter unelectability.

Matthew Stinson links to a Jonathan Chait TNR piece that takes Howard Dean to task for his vague Southern strategy. As Chait points out, it’s Southern Politics 101 all over again:

So Dean’s plan is to get poor Southern whites to vote their economic interests rather than their cultural predilections. How simple! Why hasn’t somebody else thought of that idea? Oh wait, that’s right: Everybody has thought of that idea.

The notion that the Southern economic elite try to divide the populace along racial rather than economic lines goes back around 400 years. Even though most southern whites didn’t own slaves, a majority of them supported the institution. ...

As it turns out, forging that economic coalition is a good deal more difficult than it sounds. The only success liberals have enjoyed has come when they’ve found candidates like Bill Clinton, who distanced himself from cultural liberalism (on issues like crime and welfare, for instance) to convince Southern whites that he was more conservative than the national Democratic Party.

Actually, before the 1960s maybe-realignment, southern Democrats regularly ran on economic issues—and won. The most infamous example is Huey Long, but national Democrats running for the presidency were winning electoral college votes across the South into the 1960s. What’s changed?

1. Since the Great Society programs of LBJ, and their consolidation under Nixon, there’s a sufficient national “safety net” that Republicans are not going to dismantle—no matter what rhetoric you hear from the far left. This has diminished the economic interest of poor whites in supporting Democratic candidates.
2. The national Democratic party has moved away from the conservative values shared by southern whites, most infamously in its blanket support for Roe v. Wade. This makes Republicans relatively more appealing.

Can national Democrats recapture the South? Unless they can neutralize Republicans’ natural advantage on “race, guns, God and gays,” or can come up with an economic program that is overwhelmingly appealing to both poor whites and blacks (perhaps like Dean’s idea of “affirmitive action” on the basis of economic status, rather than race), that seems exceedingly unlikely.

Steven Taylor points out yet another idiotic provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act—just in case all of the other idiotic provisions of the Incumbency Protection Act of 2002 were insufficient to raise your ire.

More evidence that Howie Dean is moving right after securing the support of the Atrios fringe: he’s daring to say that just maybe all Southerners who fly the Confederate battle flag aren’t necessarily racists—an article of common sense that nonetheless escapes most national Democrats, who apparently don’t bother talking to their fellow partisans—except the ones who wear the Quixotic “I’m a progressive” label like some sort of pathetic badge of honor—in states like Mississippi and Georgia.

Oh yes, Dean’s now flirting with the DLC wing of the party:

Yesterday, Dean said he wants to create a biracial coalition in the South. “For my fellow Democratic opponents to sink to this level is really tragic,” he said. “The only way we’re going to beat George Bush is if southern white working families and African American working families come together under the Democratic tent.”

I still think the “Dean is a moderate” meme is a load of flaming crap, and his idea of national security policy is worse than a joke. I think he’d roll over for the gun controllers in Congress in a heartbeat (not that I’m hugely invested in that issue). And I generally believe that anyone who can excite large numbers of college undergrads about his campaign is prima facie unsuitable for high office. But if he keeps saying sensible things like this I might actually have to reconsider my overall assessment of the guy.

Mind you, I’m still voting for Sharpton in the primary, because I’d love nothing more than to see the Democratic Party have to deal with the consequences of spending years coddling this race-baiting fool.

Rick Henderson is puzzled by the “Libertarians for Dean” phenomenon, including its backing by some of his former colleagues at Reason.

One of the sound-bites being paraded around is on whether particular Democratic candidates are “credible” on national security. The latest iteration of this theme was expressed by Joe Biden, who said:

[T]he candidates have to “demonstrate that they have a foreign policy, a security policy, that is coherent and is grown up, that we can handle the bad things out there in the world.”

But what is credibility? In this voter’s mind, it’s not strictly speaking about Iraq: by my standard, you could be credible but have opposed the war in Iraq. To me, I think credibility boils down to whether or not the candidate believes that other countries get to veto the use of American military power to achieve an objective that is in the national interest. Ultimately, this question—not the war question—is where many of the Democratic candidates lose their credibility with me.

This is not, mind you, a call for blanket unilateralism. When other countries share our objectives, and are willing to cooperate with us in achieving those objectives, we can and should work with them to do so. But when other countries clearly have different objectives than those of the United States—as was the case in the Iraq war, where a number of middle-power states wanted to pursue commercial ties with the Saddam regime and were plainly unwilling to commit their own resources to containing that regime’s ambitions for rearmament and obtaining non-conventional weapons—an American president would be deeply unwise to allow them to decide whether and how American military force should be used.

Colby Cosh plays Excel number-cruncher and takes a look at the likely electoral impact of the merger between the Progressive Conservatives and Alliance north of the border. The raw math suggests the new party be able might deprive the Liberals of an overall majority in Parliament (though probably not by enough for the Conservatives to form a government), on the basis of the support for its candidates in past elections when they ran as members of separate parties. Of course, there’s still a campaign to be run, which no doubt will affect the numbers substantially.

Martin Devon has his latest overview of how the nine dwarves are doing in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2004.

Today’s flap: Andrew Sullivan said, based on news that federal employment is at its peak since 1990:

The sheer profligacy of this administration continues to astound. If you’re a fiscal conservative, Howard Dean is beginning to look attractive.

Matthew Stinson thinks this is hogwash, James Joyner is just bemused, and Alan of Petrified Truth doesn’t think Dean’s record of fiscal conservatism is exactly what it’s cracked up to be (a position I generally agree with). But Matthew’s assertions seem to be a bit clouded by his partisan biases:

Did Andrew ever stop and think that perhaps the reason why the federal government payroll has gained a million contracted workers is that the government has to pay for the war on terror?

Either this is a non-sequitor or Matthew is trying to make a giant leap of logic here. The federal government payroll has been swelled by non-contract workers due to the War on Terror—the civilians who used to handle baggage screening, for example, are now federal employees working for the Transportation Security Agency. Surely there are some contract jobs are related to defense spending, but not all of them are; the WaPo account says:

Instead, much of the surge is attributable to increases in anti-terrorism efforts and defense spending, which accounted for 500,000 of the new jobs, the study found.

So 50% of the jobs have nothing to do with defense or homeland security. That’s not a very good number if you’re trying to defend the growth of government under Bush 43, and the sort of thing likely to contribute to the general discontent with the administration from Republicans and Republican-leaning libertarians that Dan Drezner noted yesterday in his blog.

Now, you can certainly quibble with the measurement in the Brookings study: does every professor—and associated research assistants—whose research is supported by a grant from DoE or NSF count as a “federal employee”? Do the contractors who construct federal-aid highways count? How about state and local employees—and private-sector workers—whose jobs are partially paid for by federal money, or whose jobs wouldn’t exist without federal laws (which would drag in hundreds of thousands of private-sector workers who monitor corporate compliance with federal mandates)? And, certainly, the population has risen substantially since 1990, so as a percentage of the total workforce government isn’t as big an employer as it was in 1990, even by the Brookings methodology. But for someone alleging he’s going to cut government, Bush sure has a funny way of doing it.

A few miscellaneous items:

1. Lots of talking heads seem to be running around saying that it’s a fait accompli that the Democratic nominee in 2004 will be “pro-war.” Either the fix is in or these commentators are letting their fantasies get in the way of electoral reality, which shows that both Iowa (caucuses = activists) and New Hampshire (almost-favorite son) are in the Dean column.
2. However, running against the war in Iraq is electoral suicide in the general election. As I already pointed out, the Democratic base (not to be confused with Democratic activists and Naderites) believes Saddam was heavily involved in terrorism against America and our allies, and every day Americans die from fedayeen tactics in the Sunni Triangle will only reinforce this impression.
3. Contrary to the beliefs of Howard Dean, higher taxes do not stimulate the economy, excepting the housing market in suburban Virginia and Maryland. People may not have been gung ho for tax cuts, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be annoyed when you promise to raise their taxes again, especially if it’s to pay for things they already have (like health insurance).
4. There are real issues to run on against Bush that won’t alienate the swing voters in the South that Al Gore drove off by the busload in 2000. Play up the Saudi connection. Run against the incompetence of the Justice Department and CIA (and shift the “Bush lied” meme in that direction). And keep abortion and guns out of the campaign.
5. Corollary: continue to whine about Florida in 2000, and you will lose again. Nobody likes a sore loser. Especially when you’ve got real issues to run on, like the Terrorist Connection That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

The latest Chicago School piece in The New Republic by Daniel Drezner argues that Howard Dean is about as credible as his fellow Democratic candidates on national defense, although Dean does share Dick Gephardt’s isolationist views on trade. (A number of relevant links are at Dan’s blog.)

Meanwhile, James Joyner thinks the combination of frontloading and proportional delegate allocation may lead to a brokered convention. Since nobody’s going to completely run out of money before the primaries are effectively over, there is a fair chance that no candidate will get a majority of the delegates; if any candidates are going to drop out, they’re probably going to do it before Iowa. And given that the presidential primaries often are both standalone (with no other races on the ballot) and open, there’s a reasonable chance there will be significant cross-over voting among Republicans, which may help fringe candidates and those who may be perceived as too liberal to win the general election—Sharpton and Dean could quite possibly pick up a large chunk of delegates in the South with a combination of black votes and Republican crossover voters acting as “spoilers.”

John Cole thinks Dean’s going to win the Democratic nomination. I guess if I had to put my money on anyone, I’d probably put it on Dean too—even though there are some Democrats who don’t think Dean is credible on national security. But when credibility on national security in the field of candidates is solely differentiated by whether or not you served in a war that half of the Democratic primary voters don’t remember (hi, John Kerry!) and the other half opposed, I don’t believe that’s much of a handicap.

James at OTB links to a Mark Steyn piece in today’s Washington Times in which Steyn argues that Howard Dean will peak soon. I’m not particularly convinced, mainly due to the lackluster Democratic field and the diminished appeal of potential Dean vote-splitter Ralph Nader to the “progressive” fringe (or, as Dean would put it, “Democratic wing”). And, with the highly compressed primary schedule, there’s a good chance Dean could remake himself into a centrist in time for Labor Day 2004 if the party grandees don’t panic and bring in an outside candidate as the nominee.

Dean Esmay, meanwhile, also ponders (the other) Dean’s prospects (via One Hand Clapping).

Via OTB and others, I discovered my best matches for 2004:

1. Libertarian Candidate (100%)
2. Bush, George W. – US President (82%)
3. Sharpton, Reverend Al – Democrat (50%)
4. Gephardt, Cong. Dick, MO - Democrat (50%)
5. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (49%)
6. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (48%)
7. Lieberman Senator Joe CT - Democrat (47%)
8. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (43%)
9. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH - Democrat (42%)
10. Phillips, Howard – Constitution (39%)
11. Graham, Senator Bob, FL - Democrat (23%)
12. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol IL - Democrat (15%)
13. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. – Democrat (-6%)

Judging from the negative number on LaRouche, I think there are some bugs yet to be worked out…